Oh how tender!—how mild!—How pitiful he could be!
When I say I loved him, I use, for want of a better, a word which ill expresses that feeling. It was—Heaven forgive me if I err in using the similitude—the sort of feeling the Shunamite woman might have had for Elisha. Religion added to its intensity; for I was brought up a devout Catholic; and he, whatever his private opinions might have been, adhered strictly to the forms of the same Church. He was unmarried, and most people supposed him to belong to that Order called—though often, alas! How unlike Him from whom they assume their name—the Society of Jesus.
We lived thus—I entirely worshipping, he guiding, fondling, watching, and ruling by turns, for two whole years. I was mistress of a large fortune, and, though not beautiful, had, I believe, a tolerable intellect and a keen wit. With both he used to play, according as it suited his whim—just as a boy plays with fireworks, amusing himself with their glitter—sometimes directing them against others, and smiling as they flashed or scorched—knowing that against himself they were utterly powerless and harmless. Knowing, too, perhaps, that were it otherwise, he had only to tread them out under foot, and step aside from the ashes, with the same unmoved, easy smile.
I never knew—nor know I to this day, whether I was in the smallest degree dear to him. Useful I was, I think, and pleasant, I believe. Possibly he liked me a little, as the potter likes his clay, and the skilful mechanic his tools—until the clay hardened, and the fine tools refused to obey the master’s hand.
I was the brilliant West Indian heiress. I did not marry. Why should I? At my house—at least it was called mine—all sorts and societies met, carrying on their separate games; the quiet, soft hand of M. Anastasius playing his game—in, and under, and through them all. Mingled with this grand game of the world was a lesser one—to which he turned sometimes, just for amusement, or because he could not cease from his métier—a simple, easy, domestic game, of which the battledore was the same ingenious hand, and the shuttlecock my foolish child’s heart.
Thus much have I dilated on him, and on my own life, during the years when all its strong wild current flowed towards him; that, in what followed when the tide turned, no one may accuse me of fickleness, or causeless aversion, or insane terror of one who after all was only man, “whose breath is in his nostrils.”
At seventeen I was wholly passive in his hands; he was my sole arbiter of right and wrong—my conscience—almost my God. As my character matured, and in a few things I began to judge for myself, we had occasional slight differences—begun, on my part, in shy humility, continued with vague doubt, but always ending in penitence and tears. Since one or other erred, of course it must be I. These differences were wholly on abstract points of truth or justice.
It was his taking me by a persuasion that was like compulsion, to the ball at the Tuileries, which was given after Louis Napoleon Bonaparte had seized the Orleans property, and it was my watching my cousin’s conduct there, his diplomatic caution of speech; his smooth smiling reverence to men whom I knew, and fancied he knew, to be either knaves or fools—that first startled me concerning him. Then it was I first began to question, in a trembling, terrified way—like one who catches a glimpse of the miracle-making priest’s hands behind the robe of the worshipped idol—whether, great as M. Anastasius was, as a political ruler, as a man of the world, as a faithful member of the Society of Jesus, he was altogether so great when viewed beside any one of those whose doctrines he disseminated, whose faith he professed.
He had allowed me the New Testament, and I had been reading it a good deal lately. I placed him, my spiritual guide, at first in adoring veneration, afterwards with an uneasy comparison, beside the Twelve Fishermen of Galilee—beside the pattern of perfect manhood, as exemplified in their Divine Lord—and ours.
There was a difference.
The next time we came to any argument—always on abstract questions—for my mere individual will never have any scruple in resigning itself to his—instead of yielding I ceased open contest, and brought the matter afterwards privately to the One infallible Rule of right and wrong.
The difference grew.
Gradually, I began to take my cousin’s wisdom—perhaps, even his virtues—with certain reservations, feeling that there was growing in me some antagonistic quality which prevented my full understanding or sympathizing with the idiosyncrasies of his character.
“But,” I thought, “he is a Jesuit; he only follows the law of his Order, which allows temporizing, and diplomatising, for noble ends. He merely dresses up the Truth, and puts it in the most charming and safest light, even as we do our images of the Holy Virgin, adorning them for the adoration of the crowd, but ourselves spiritually worshipping them still. I do believe, much as he will dandle and play with the truth, that, not for his hope of heaven, would Anastasius stoop to a lie.”
One day, he told me he should bring to my salons an Englishman, his relative, who had determined on leaving the world and entering the priesthood.
“Is he of our faith?” asked I indifferently.
“He is, from childhood. He has a strong, fine intellect; this, under fit guidance, may accomplish great things. Once of our Society, he might be my right hand in every Court in Europe. You will receive him?”
“Certainly.”
But I paid very little heed to the stranger. There was nothing about him striking or peculiar. He was the very opposite of M. Anastasius. Besides, he was young, and I had learnt to despise youth—my guardian was fifty years old.
Mr. Saltram (you will already have guessed it was he) showed equal indifference to me. He watched me, sometimes did little kindnesses for me, but always was quiet and silent—a mere cloud floating in the brilliant sky, which M. Anastasius lit up as its gorgeous sun. For me, I became moonlike, appearing chiefly at my cousin’s set and rise.
I was not happy. I read more in my Bible and less in my breviary; I watched with keener, harder eyes my cousin Anastasius, weighed all his deeds, listened to and compared his words. My intellect worshipped him, my memoried tenderness clung round him still, but my conscience had fled out of his keeping, and made for itself a higher and purer ideal.
Measured with common men, he was godlike yet—above all passions, weaknesses, crimes; but viewed by the one perfect standard of man—Christian man—in charity, humility, single-mindedness, guilelessness, truth—my idol was no more. I came to look for it, and found only the empty shrine.
He went on a brief mission to Rome. I marvelled that instead as of yore wandering sadly through the empty house from the moment he quitted it, I breathed freer, as if a weight were taken out of the air. His absence used to be like wearisome ages—now it seemed hardly a week before he came back.
I happened to be sitting with his nephew Alexis when I heard his step down the corridor—the step which had once seemed at every touch to, draw music from the chords of my prostrate heart, but which now made it shrink into itself, as if an iron-shod footfall had passed along its strings.
Anastasius looked slightly surprised at seeing Alexis and myself together, but his welcome was very kind to us both.
I could not altogether return it. I had just found out two things which, to say the least, had startled me. I determined to prove them at once.
“My cousin, I thought you were aware that, though a Catholic myself, my house is open, and my friendship likewise, to honest men of every creed. Why did you give your nephew so hard an impression of me, as to suppose I would dislike him on account of his faith? And why did you not tell me that Mr. Saltram has for some years been a Protestant?”
I know not what reply he made; I know only that it was ingenious, lengthy, gentle, courteous—that for the time being it seemed entirely satisfactory, that we spent all three together a most pleasant evening. It was only when I lay down on my bed, face to face with the solemn Dark, in which dwelt cons
cience, truth, and God, that I discovered how Anastasius had, for some secret—doubtless blameless, nay even justifiable purpose, told of me, and to me, two absolute Lies!
Disguise it as he might, excuse it as I might, and did, they were Lies. They haunted me—flapping their black wings like a couple of fiends, mopping and mowing behind him when he came—sitting on his shoulders, and mocking his beautiful, calm, majestic face—for days. That was the beginning of my sorrows; gradually they grew until they blackened my whole world.
M. Anastasius was bent, as he had (for once truly) told me, on winning his young nephew back into the true fold, making him an instrument of that great purpose which was to bring all Europe, the Popedom itself, under the power of the Society of Jesus. Not this alone—a man may be forgiven, nay, respected, who sells his soul for an abstract cause in which he himself is to be absorbed and forgotten—but in this case it was not—though I long, believed it—it was not so. Carefully as he disguised it, I slowly found out that the centre of all things—the one grand pivot upon which this vast machinery for the improvement, or rather government, of the world, was to be made to turn, was M. Anastasius.
Alexis Saltram might be of use to him. He was rich, and money is power; an Englishman, and Englishmen are usually honourable and honoured. Also there was in him a dogged directness of purpose that would make him a strong, if carefully guided, tool.
However, the young man resisted. He admired and revered his kinsman; but he himself was very single-hearted, staunch, and true. Something in that Truth, which was the basis of his character, struck sympathy with mine. He was far inferior in most things to Anastasius—he knew it, I knew it, but through all, this divine element of Truth was patent, beautifully clear. It was the one quality I had ever worshipped, ever sought for, and never found.
Alexis and I became friends—equal, earnest friends. Not in the way of wooing or marriage—at least, he never spoke of either; and both were far, oh how far! from my thought—but there was a great and tender bond between us, which strengthened day by day.
The link which riveted it was religion. He was as I said, a Protestant, not adhering to any creed, but simply living—not preaching, but living—the faith of our Saviour. He was not perfect—he had his sins and shortcomings even as I. We both struggled on towards the glimmering light. So, after a season, we clasped hands in friendship, and with eyes steadfastly upward, determined to press on together towards the one goal, and along the self-same road.
I put my breviary aside, and took wholly to the New Testament, assuming no name either of Catholic or Protestant, but simply that of Christian.
When I decided on this, of course I told Anastasius. He had ceased to be my spiritual confessor for some time; yet I could see he was surprised.
“Who has done this?” was all he said.
Was I a reed, then, to be blown about with every wind? Or a toy, to be shifted from hand to hand, and set in motion just as my chance-master chose? Had I no will, no conscience of my own?
He knew where he could sting me—and did it—but I let the words pass.
“Cousin, when you ask, ‘Who did it?’ I answer, Desdemona-like, ‘Nobody’: I myself. In my change of faith I have had no book but this—which you gave me; no priest, except the inward witness of my own soul.”
“And Alexis Saltram.”
Not said in any wrath, or suspicion, or inquiry—simply as the passive statement of a fact. When I denied it, he accepted my denial; when I protested, he suffered me to protest. My passionate arguments he took in his soft passionless hold—melted and moulded them—turned and twisted them—then reproduced them to me so different that I failed to recognize either my own meaning or even my own words.
After that, on both sides the only resource was silence.
Chapter III
“I wish,” said I to my guardian one day, “as I shall be twenty-one next year, to have more freedom. I wish even”—for since the discovery of my change of faith he had watched me so closely, so quietly, so continually, that I had conceived a vague fear of him, and a longing to get away—to put half the earth between me and his presence—“I wish even if possible this summer, to visit my estates in Hispaniola?”
“Alone?”
“No; Madam Gradelle will accompany me. And Mr. Saltram will charter one of his ships for my use.”
“I approve the plan. Alexis is going too, I believe?”
How could he have known that which Alexis had never told me? But he knew everything. “Madame Gradelle is not sufficient escort. I, as your guardian, will accompany and protect you.”
A cold dread seized me. Was I never to be free? Already I began to feel my guardian’s influence surrounding me—an influence once of love, now of intolerable distaste, and even fear. Not that he was ever harsh or cruel—not that I could accuse him of any single wrong towards me or others: but I knew I had thwarted him, and, through him, his cause—that cause whose strongest dogma is, that any means are sacred; any evil consecrated to good, if furthering the one great end—Power.
I had opposed him, and I was in his hand—that hand which I had once believed to have almost superhuman strength. In my terror I half believed so still.
“He will go with us—we cannot escape from him,” I said to Alexis. “He will make you a priest and me a nun, as he once planned—I know he did. Our very souls are not our own.”
“What, when the world is so wide, and life so long, and God’s kindness over all—when, too, I am free, and you will be free in a year—when—”
“I shall never be free. He is my evil genius. He will haunt me till my death.”
It was a morbid feeling I had, consequent on the awful struggle which had so shaken body and mind. The very sound of his step made me turn sick and tremble; the very sight of his grand face—perhaps the most beautiful I ever saw, with its faultless features, and the half-melancholy cast given by the high bald forehead and the pointed beard—was to me more terrible than any monster of ugliness the world every produced.
He held my fortune—he governed my house. All visitors there came and went under his control, except Alexis. Why this young man still came—or how—I could not tell. Probably because in his pure singleness of heart and purpose, he was stronger even than M. Anastasius.
The time passed. We embarked on board the ship Argo, for Hispaniola.
My guardian told me, at the last minute, that business relating to his Order would probably detain him in Europe—that we were to lie at anchor for twelve hours, off Havre—and, if he then came not, sail.
He came not—we sailed.
It was a glorious evening. The sun, as he went down over the burning sea, beckoned us with a finger of golden fire, westward—to the free, safe, happy West.
I say us, because on that evening we first began unconsciously to say it too—as if vaguely binding our fates together—Alexis and I. We talked for a whole hour—till long after France, with all our old life therein, had become a mere line, a cloudy speck on the horizon—of the new life we should lead in Hispaniola. Yet all the while, if we had been truly as the priest and nun Anastasius wished to make us, our words, and I believe our thoughts, could not have been more angel-pure, more free from any bias of human passion.
Yet, as the sun went down, and the sea breeze made us draw nearer together, both began, I repeat, instinctively to say “we,” and talk of our future as if it had been the future of one.
“Good evening, friends!”
He was there—M. Anastasius!
I stood petrified. That golden finger of hope had vanished. I shuddered, a captive on his courteously compelling arm—seeing nothing but his terrible smiling face and the black wilderness of sea. For the moment I felt inclined to plunge therein—as I had often longed to plunge penniless into the equally fearsome wilderness of Paris—only I felt sure he would fo
llow me still. He would track me, it seemed, through the whole world.
“You see I have been able to accomplish the voyage; men mostly can achieve any fixed purpose—at least some men. Isbel, this sea-air will bring back your bloom. And, Alexis, my friend, despite those close studies you told me of, I hope you will bestow a little of your society at times on my ward and me. We will bid you a good evening now.”
He transferred to his nephew my powerless hand; that of Alexis, too, felt cold and trembling. It seemed as if he likewise were succumbing to the fate which, born out of one man’s indomitable will, dragged us asunder. Ere my guardian consigned me to Madame Gradelle, he said, smiling, but looking me through and through.
“Remember, my fair cousin, that Alexis is to be—must be—a priest.”
“It is impossible!” said I, stung to resistance. “You know he has altogether seceded from the Catholic creed; he will never return to it. His conscience is his own.”
“But not his passions. He is young—I am old. He will be a priest yet.”
With a soft hand-pressure, M. Anastasius left me.
Now began the most horrible phase of my existence. For four weeks we had to live in the same vessel; bounded and shut up together,—Anastasius, Alexis, and I; meeting continually, in the soft bland atmosphere of courteous calm; always in public—never alone.
From various accidental circumstances, I discovered how M. Anastasius was now bending all the powers of his enormous intellect, his wonderful moral influence, to compass his cherished ends with regard to Alexis Saltram.
The Sixth Ghost Story Megapack Page 35